Cult Film and Experimental Music

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Monthly Archives: March 2014

“I’ve always been a fan of music that is left of center. It wasn’t until i started to work with Patton that i realized i had the instinctual ability to play avant-garde style of music. When Patton introduced me to the first Fantomas demo’s I felt very comfortable and connected with the music. When I performed Xu Feng for the first time with John Zorn and his ensemble, I was comfortable and uninhibited. This is the most pure form of musical self expression.”

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“When I started listening to African music like juju music, I got turned on to King Sunny Ade,” he remembers, “I loved those interweaving guitar parts, and I really got into that guitar playing style. He would sing balls to the wall; with complete unbridled enthusiasm and I knew how amazing and inimitable it was. Some white kid from rural Florida could never make music like that. So it was about finding my own way to represent the music that made me feel the most.”

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“I listen to film music today, and every sound is just so completely rounded off and smooth and over compressed with the same kind of reverb. They record on a million dollar soundstage for a film that’s set somewhere nasty, where you need real grit. They could learn so much by seeing what these lofi recording studios did, like early dub recordings. Stuff where there is rubberiness – adjectives that you don’t get in high end studios.” These are the words of one of the most astounding and precocious musicians never to find distribution in Australia. William Ryan Fritch has served time as a bandleader for Sole (Anticon), released fourth world exotic music under his Vieo Abiungo moniker, and extensively scored documentary film. Last year he produced a majestic score to the Waiting Room, a film that documents 24 hours in the waiting room of an Oakland Hospital. It was issued on US label Lost Tribe Sound, who have released almost all of his recorded output and it’s fascinating to hear his development. Over the last few years he has moved from strange erratic quasi world music soups of cacophony to highly emotive suites of modern classical to his forthcoming highly idiosyncratic widescreen cinematic folk. In fact he’s just experienced such a musically creative period with a 10 track EP, and two full length albums on the way that Lost Tribe are combining it with downloads of his soundtracks and numerous other extras in a William Ryan Fritch subscription series. Check http://losttribesound.com/ for some of the most remarkable music around.

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Jogjakarta’s Senyawa have a unique ability to merge cultural traditions with the avant garde, resulting in a heady brew of truly unique music. They’ve toured Australia blowing audiences away at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival, with Wukir Suryadi’s ‘Bamboo Spear,’ a thick stem of bamboo strung up with percussive strips of the plant’s skin and steel strings alongside Rully Shabara’s, screeching, growling and peculiar extended vocal techniques. Their music draws on everything from John Zorn’s Torture Garden to more traditional sounds with an aggressive Boredomsesque punk rock attitude. They’re releasing a new LP Acaraki on Australia’s home of the weird Dual Plover, who in a new strategy put the album up as a Pozible campaign selling 200 pre order LP’s only, thus subverting traditional marketing and distribution costs and ensuring that Lucas Abela does

n’t end up with a box of unwanted records under his bed. For cutting edge music this approach seems particularly interesting and may signal the way of the future.

Otherwise if you like your obscure West African cassette music Awesome Tapes From Africa, he of the incredible blog, is back in Australia for Womadelaide and will be DJing at Section 8 on March 9. Whilst another Womadelaide refugee Will Holland aka Quantic who twists disparate genres together like Cumbia and Dub in his own productions will be DJing at Boney on the 7th of March. But if you want to see the great Femi Kuti or John Zorn or Stars of the Lid there’s only one place you can go: Adelaide.